


five months, two weeks, two days

by alleyesonthehindenburg



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-24 23:24:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16185371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alleyesonthehindenburg/pseuds/alleyesonthehindenburg
Summary: Everyone in the game knows about the monsters that come out of the KGB. Rumours abound about how they are made, and some are fairly imaginative, but it’s the classics that stick around. Bred specially by the Soviets. Separated young and numbed to the pain. Severed, not that anyone’s ever proved it possible.Whatever story you ascribe to, the moral is the same. Stay away from the men with no dæmons.





	five months, two weeks, two days

** One. **

Peril is delirious the first time he says her name.

There's a nasty cocktail of drugs in his system, and bruises stand out black and blue on his face and ribs. THRUSH managed to snag him after a mission went sideways. He was there for three days before Gaby and Napoleon got him out, and now they’re all crammed into a tiny, decrepit motel room near the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station. The damage isn’t bad, Napoleon thinks. The ribs are cracked, not broken, and Peril hasn’t lost any teeth. But he’s sweating bullets, pupils dilated as he thrashes about on the dingy twin-size bed, and he gasps out incoherent sentences in Russian as Napoleon and Gaby try to calm him.

Corona is crouched nearby, her bushy tail swishing back and forth as she watches. She steps out of the way when Gaby goes to wet a washcloth in the bathroom, and then settles back into position, narrowed eyes focused intensely on Peril.

Napoleon pays her no mind, too busy trying to wrestle the Russian into stillness. Gaby returns and presses the washcloth to Peril’s forehead, shushing him as she brushes back his hair. “The water’s barely cold,” she says. Ferdi watches them from atop the dresser, silent apart from the occasional ruffle of his feathers.

“I don’t think he minds,” Napoleon quips, but it’s a chore to keep the worry out of his voice. Peril has stilled somewhat, and Napoleon cautiously lifts his weight off of him, one hand left resting on his chest. The babbling has quieted down to a strained whisper, and as Napoleon leans forward, he can just make out a single word.

“Nadezhda,” he repeats.

Gaby frowns at him, fingers still absently carding through Peril’s hair. “Who is that?”

“I don’t know, ask him.”

She leans forward, brow furrowed as she tries to catch what Peril’s saying. If Napoleon strains, he can just hear the shaky Russian, a litany of Nadezhda, my Nadezhda.

“She’s his dæmon,” Corona says.

Napoleon doesn’t startle, but it’s a near thing. He hadn’t even felt her jump onto the bed. Gaby’s hand has stilled, surprise frozen on her face, and Napoleon feels too caught off-guard to lift his palm from where it rests on Peril’s chest.

 

Everyone in the game knows about the monsters that come out of the KGB. Rumours abound about how they are made, and some are fairly imaginative, but it’s the classics that stick around. Bred specially by the Soviets. Separated young and numbed to the pain. Severed, not that anyone’s ever proved it possible.

Whatever story you ascribe to, the moral is the same. Stay away from the men with no dæmons.

It’s the only thing Napoleon and Corona have ever fought about. At first, he was just as repulsed as she was. Seeing a man walk around, alone, a little case clipped to his belt that they all knew had no insect dæmon inside – it was unnatural, horrific. Napoleon’s seen it all before, but it never fails to make his stomach twist into knots.

Except a man without a dæmon is still a man, and by the end of that mess in Rome, Napoleon’s developed an odd fascination with the Red Peril. One mission becomes two, five, ten, and when Napoleon sees Corona glaring at him from across the room as he, heaven help him, laughs with Peril, he knows he’s in trouble.

It’s unnatural, Corona tells him. It’s wrong. It’s an aberration.

I know that, Napoleon tells her. But it’s Peril. It’s Illya.

She doesn’t speak to him for a week.

 

That night, with the name of his dæmon falling from Peril’s lips like a supplication, Corona sleeps on the bed beside him. No one mentions it in the morning.

 

** Two. **

The second time, Illya and Napoleon come to blows.

What was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance mission turned into a firefight in the slums of Rabat. Gaby’s not entirely sure what happened after she got separated from the boys, but they come storming into the safehouse sopping wet at three in the morning, both spitting mad. Corona shakes out her sodden fur, a low growl rumbling deep in her throat. Illya pitches the dæmon case he keeps on his belt onto the bed. Gaby knows it’s empty – Illya has long since given up pretending with them – but she still winces as the case misses the mattress and hits the floor with a thud.

Napoleon sniffs, fiddling with the cufflinks on his shirt as if the whole thing’s not a loss already, and make some snide comment about Illya’s aim. Apparently it’s the last straw, because Illya charges at him.

Gaby rolls her eyes and retreats to the bathroom, humming an American jazz song that she overheard when they went to Nevada. Ferdi whistles along. He swoops down to grab her golden earrings as she tugs them off, ruffling his black and white feathers in a self-satisfied manner. Occasionally she hears a muffled thud or curse – in English as well as Russian – through the door. “They’re so typical,” she says, and Ferdi snickers his agreement.

The room is quiet by the time she finishes. Napoleon has Illya pinned to the ground, and Gaby takes a moment to consider how often Illya ends up in that position before she smacks Napoleon upside the head with a magazine.

“Down, boy,” she says. The humour fades away with the identical glares they give her. Whatever they’re fighting about, it’s serious, and she sighs, pouring herself a glass of cognac from the drinking cart. “What is this about?”

“Our dearest Peril here thought we could leave Corona behind.” The usual thinly-veiled affection is gone from the nickname as Napoleon snaps it out.

“Is not what I said,” Illya hisses, frustration clear in his voice. The fact that he hasn’t thrown Napoleon off of him yet is telling. “I said she will not fit on bicycle.”

Gaby has a sudden, absurd mental image of Illya riding a bike, with Napoleon on his shoulders and the red fox perched on top.

“And then you suggested we come back for her with the car,” Napoleon snaps. “Maybe you abominations at the KGB forget, but that’s not how real humans function. Did Nadezhda call out for you when you left her behind?”

 

As with all Soviet Bloc countries, the KGB has a notable presence in East Germany. They aren’t always visible – they are the _secret_ service, after all – but they’re there, and Gaby knows that better than most. Most carry metal cases meant for insect dæmons. It's easy to tell them apart, sometimes, when they act too roughly with the case, like they've forgotten what it's like to have a soul.

Illya is the first she’s ever seen up close.

At first, she’ll admit, the revulsion overwhelms her. Finding him suddenly at her back, six foot who-the-fuck-knows and distinctly dæmonless – she storms out of the store, Ferdi flitting about in a tizzy, slowing down only when Napoleon’s fox skids to a halt in front of her. She allows Napoleon to coax her back inside, of course – she has a mission to complete – but she’d be lying if she said her own morbid curiosity didn’t make it easier. How did a man survive without a dæmon? How could she use it to her advantage?

Whatever she’s expecting, it’s not what she gets. Illya growls and swears and plants bugs everywhere, but he also lets her slap him, and lifts her into bed when she pretends to fall asleep atop him. For a man without a soul, he seems quite gentle.

When she blows his cover to Onkel Rudi, she even spares a second to hope he doesn't die.

 

Silence falls heavy on the room. Napoleon bows his head and stands up carefully, holding out a hand, the closest to an apology he’ll likely get. Illya’s expression is inscrutable as stone, and he remains frozen on the floor for a long moment before he climbs to his feet, ignoring Napoleon’s proffered help. Without a word, both men vanish into their respective rooms, Corona trailing after Napoleon, Illya constantly, conspicuously alone.

Ferdi lands on Gaby’s shoulder, and she wonders how far he could fly before she broke.

 

**Three.**

Napoleon’s just had a fairly nasty fall, so he can be forgiven for nearly missing the next time it happens.

It’s really quite a mess. He and Peril are loitering on the Poniatowsky Bridge over the Vistula, and then suddenly they’re _in_ the Vistula. Napoleon’s not sure what happened, except that there was the sound of a vehicle accelerating, and now he’s very wet. His head breaks the surface of the water, the cold air a relief for only a split second before he feels an awful tug and sputters, “Corona – “

Peril, who had surfaced beside him, immediately vanishes again. Napoleon spends a moment treading water, trying to get his bearings, before a chill runs up his spine that has nothing to do with the April weather. It’s not a new sensation, the tingling in his chest that he feels whenever someone touches Corona, but this time it’s… not painful. Not uncomfortable, even, and isn’t that a novelty. Peril reemerges a second later, his lips positively blue, Corona hacking up river water in his arms. He herds the lot of them back towards the bridge, where they drag themselves onto the stone debris at the foot of one of the columns, Napoleon sparing a moment to mourn for his suit as the sleeve snags on a wooden beam leftover from some war or another. Corona stumbles over to Napoleon as soon as Peril puts her down, and Napoleon draws her into his arms.

“That was not enjoyable,” Corona says, and Napoleon huffs out a laugh as he struggles out of his sodden suit jacket.

He looks up as he does so, and finds Peril’s wistful gaze resting on Corona’s dripping form curled up in Napoleon’s lap. The Russian agent looks utterly pathetic, for lack of a better word, miserable and soaking and shivering fit to fly apart, and as Napoleon leans back against against the stone column he stretches out an arm in invitation. “A moment’s rest,” he says. Peril gives him a wary look, like he half expects... well, Napoleon’s not sure what, exactly. But he scooches over, and soon enough Napoleon’s got a veritable wall of Russian against his left side.

They’re silent for a bit, enjoying what little body heat they have left to share. Not enough, in Napoleon’s opinion. He’s about to suggest they look for a way off the bridge – preferably dry – when Peril says, almost inaudibly, “Sorry.”

Frozen or not, Napoleon’s still capably of cocking an eyebrow incredulously. “Whatever for?”

“It is…” Peril gestures, seemingly at a loss for words, or at least the English ones, and the shivers wracking his body don’t help. “I know, is not pleasant. To feel.”

“You’ve lost me,” Napoleon says. Corona has raised her head, ears perked up as she watches Peril, though the usual suspicion is conspicuously absent from her gaze. Napoleon wonders if she’s coming around to his side of things.

“It – the _touching_.” Peril's voice has risen in volume, frustration in his tone as he tries to make himself understood. “I know is unpleasant. I am sorry.”

Napoleon blinks, taken aback, but Corona speaks before he does. “Better touching than drowning,” she says. “Don’t worry your pretty head about it.”

The burning of cold air in Napoleon’s lungs when he laughs is worth it.

 

Later on, in the hotel room, when they’re both ensconced on their respective twin beds under a hundred layers of blankets that Gaby so generously provided, Napoleon asks, “Have other people touched Nadezhda often?”

Because it’s playing on a loop in his mind, the way Peril said _I know_. In Napoleon’s experience, no one’s ever gotten their hands on Corona except for in the field (and during a few bar brawls back in his soldiering days, but the less said about that, the better). But Nadezhda isn’t in the field. Napoleon doesn’t know where Nadezhda is, except that it surely can’t be anywhere good.

As the silence stretches out, it occurs to Napoleon that his partner’s already fallen asleep. He’s about to follow suit when the blankets on the bed across from him rustle, and Napoleon turns onto his side and opens his eyes. Peril’s are bloodshot with exhaustion, but his lips are no longer blue, and there’s some colour back in his cheeks. It’s progress.

“Only when is necessary,” he says, accent thick with sleepiness.

Gaby chooses that moment to step into the room, but somehow, it doesn’t break the fragile thing in the air between them, only expands it. She’s silent as she sits at the foot of Peril’s bed, reaching out a hand to rub his calf through the blankets as Ferdi settles on Corona’s back. Napoleon’s glad Gaby’s there for his next question.

“Can you feel it still?”

Peril’s eyes slip shut, like Napoleon’s drained the last of his energy with words alone. “Da,” he says, “always.”

 

 

**Four.**

Booze, Gaby thinks, works better than any sort of torture.

It’s well-deserved, too. The mission in Cairo was, as Waverly put it, a smashing success. A congratulatory drink in the hotel room has turned into four or five or six congratulatory drinks in the hotel room. Gaby’s pleasantly buzzed, her limbs loose enough that her dancing has lost its coordination. Napoleon has laid claim to the bathroom to take a shower, and Illya is half-reclining on the sofa, eyelids heavy with drink.

It was Ferdi who realised that Illya is a lightweight. It had been like Christmas and her birthday all rolled into one when he told Gaby, and judging by the look on Napoleon’s face, he’d felt the same. Even better was the discovery that Illya is a relaxed, contented, _cuddly_ drunk. On more than one occasion, Gaby has woken up to a killer hangover and a six-foot-something Russian curled up with his head in her lap.

Now, though, the splitting headache is twelve hours away and Ferdi’s flying loop-the-loops around the room in tune with the music. “We deserve a vacation,” Gaby says. “A proper vacation, somewhere warm.”

“We are in Cairo,” Illya says in Russian. He always defaults to his mother tongue when his faculties are compromised.

“Yes!” She points at him, and frowns. “Somewhere cold, then. Skiing! We’ll go skiing.”

“Everywhere is cold.”

Gaby makes a face. “I don’t know how you can possibly say that,” she says. Napoleon emerges from the bathroom in a light robe, scrubbing a towel over his hair. “Not with your turtlenecks and long trousers all the time. The heat must be unbearable.”

“Better than cold.”

Napoleon is crossing to the record player, where the vinyl is scratching over the same line again and again, and Gaby wonders when that started. “We’ll find somewhere with a nice moderate climate, then,” he says. “Lago di Como, perhaps. Bellagio.”

“We always end up back in Italy.”

“It’s appropriate.”

“Is cold.”

Gaby ignores Illya. There’s no sense making plans with him when he’s drunk; he’ll just have to be told everything all over again in the morning. “Why not Milan? The shopping is better.”

“So is the art.” Napoleon ruffles Illya’s hair, as he’s wont to do on nights like these. “But Lago di Como is quiet, and we can use the altitude as an excuse to ignore Waverly's calls.”

“Wonderful point,” Gaby says, toasting to the plan. She finally acknowledges Illya when he gives a gusty sigh, reaching her foot over to playfully kick at his legs. “What’s with you?”

“Cold,” Illya repeats mournfully. Gaby’s ready to brush it off as drunken melancholy, and Napoleon seems to have the same thought, given how he tugs the half-full glass of scotch out of Illya’s loose grasp.

But Ferdi glides over to perch on her shoulder, his feathers brushing his cheek, and Gaby remembers when she was a child, snowed in by a blizzard and full of energy. She had been playing catch with Ferdi – he was a dog, or something, she thinks, not yet settled – and the ball had bounced right into the fireplace. She had been on the other side of the room. But she still felt the blazing heat, burning her arms and hands as Ferdi dove head-first to get the toy. “Illya,” she says, the warm pleasure of the alcohol beginning to fade, “is Nadezhda cold?”

Nothing changes, but it’s as though the lightheartedness has been sucked out of the room. Napoleon’s smile has vanished, and every muscle in Corona’s body is rigid, her attention focussed intensely on their Soviet companion. Illya just rolls his eyes, as though the answer is obvious. “Of course she is,” he says. “Novaya Zemlya is not warm place.”

A frisson of excitement runs down Gaby’s spine. It must show on her face, judging by the strange look Napoleon is giving her, but she can’t be bothered to care. Novaya Zemlya. Gaby knows her geography, knows where in Russia it lies, though something else is hiding in the back of her mind, some significance that she can’t quite remember. Still. It’s the first concrete lead she’s gotten.

After their successful mission in Istanbul, after Waverly had shared that Solo and Kuryakin were to be on loan from their respective agencies indefinitely, he’d pulled her aside and given her another task: find out about the missing dæmons. It was ancillary, he’d said, nothing urgent, a matter of curiosity. No need to get the CIA involved. No need to let on to the KGB that they were sniffing round. Gaby had agreed at the time out of curiosity, and because she liked to have one over on the boys.

Now, with Illya’s words hanging in the silence between them, she could admit if only to herself that she had a personal stake in the matter. She takes another sip of her scotch, aware of Napoleon’s eyes on her, and turns to put a new record on.

 

** Five. **

Napoleon is not a patriot.

He might have been, back in the day, raised on the same diet of apple pie and American exceptionalism as every good boy back home, but then he went to war and saw that everyone looked the same inside-out, with dæmon dust coating their guts. His subsequent indentured servitude to the CIA did a good job of sapping away whatever sense of patriotism he had left. He learned that he could love the soldiers without loving the army; that he could love the people without loving the state.

Now, though. Now, Napoleon thinks he could die happy without ever stepping foot on American soil again.

Bile sits at the back of his throat, but he’s managed not to throw up so far. Corona fidgets in his lap, anxious to get up, to pace, to run far, far away, but there’s no room in the crappy little car that they’re all crammed into. Gaby’s in the driver’s seat, eyes focused on the dark road ahead of them, the white of her knuckles on the steering wheel betraying the tension in her grip.

None of them have spoken since they left the small base hidden near Lake Tharthar. The images are seared into Napoleon’s brain: children, clustered in a corner of the eerily pristine compound, clutching tiny motionless things to them like stuffed animals. Adults sitting nearby, making no move to comfort them. All of them with blank eyes, blank stares – Napoleon wonders how he could have thought, even for a second, that Illya was severed. There’s too much life in him for that.

The thought stirs the anger in his chest, and even though he knows it’s ill-placed Napoleon can’t be bothered to suppress it. He glances up at the rear-view mirror, finding Peril leaning against the window, staring out at the desert expressionlessly. It’s impressive that he’s held his tongue so far, that he hasn’t said anything snide about evil capitalists.

By the time they shuffle into their dingy safehouse in Baghdad, Napoleon’s spoiling for a fight. No one’s said anything for hours, and they’re so close to keeping it up til morning – Gaby’s already turning to the door of her room, Ferdi perched on her shoulder, uncharacteristically still, and Peril – Illya – is removing his jacket, gaze downcast. They’re so close to keeping this fragile peace until they can reevaluate in the light of day, but Napoleon can’t bring himself to care as he says, “This wouldn’t have happened without your lot, you know.”

Everyone stills. Smoothly, as if she’d been waiting for it, Gaby changes course, sitting on the lumpy sofa they’ve been provided. Illya looks up to meet Napoleon’s gaze, and whatever Napoleon expected to see in his eyes – rage, mostly – isn’t there; just a bone-deep weariness. He says nothing, and that angers Napoleon more than any argument would.

“It’s the same bullshit as always,” he continues. Corona is pacing the floor, making tight, irritated circles around his feet. “The Soviets have their fancy toys, so the Americans have to have them too.”

“What toys?”

Illya’s gaze is blank, blank, and Napoleon tries to focus on his anger, not the panic eating away at his thoughts. “You,” he says. “You soulless automatons, you’re not even human. How many facilities like that did the KGB have before they got it right?”

“None,” Illya says, and it’s the worst possible answer.

Napoleon swears, and slams his fist against the wall. It helps, just a bit, the satisfying pain in his hand, and he pauses, takes a deep breath.

Gaby clears her throat, crossing her legs delicately. “I think we need an explanation now, Illya.”

“I know,” he says, in Russian this time. He’s silent for a long moment, weighing his thoughts. “In Russia, there are old fairytales. Stories about witches who flew through the air, whose dæmons were not tied to them by distance.”

“We have similar stories in Germany.” Gaby leans forward, gaze intense. Napoleon says nothing; he knows his Brothers Grimm.

“Some of the stories spoke about a place where the witches would go. They would leave their dæmons behind, and walk for miles until it didn’t hurt. The KGB… it wasn’t deliberate. We weren’t chasing after fairytales. We just found it.”

“Novaya Zemlya,” Napoleon says.

If Illya is surprised that Napoleon knows, he doesn’t let on. “Da. There is a place there, in the north, where dæmons cannot go. It was found during World War II, and Russia realised we can make our agents less vulnerable. More subtle. And no spy will turn rogue when his dæmon is still there.”

“Not all KGB agents do it,” Gaby says. It’s not a question.

“No. Only the top agents, and even then only some of us can go through with it. It is – very painful.”

It’s all too easy to imagine. Illya in a snowy landscape, the weight of his father’s treason and his mother’s trials on his shoulders, walking resiliently away as his dæmon calls for him to come back. Or would she? Napoleon doesn’t know a thing about Nadezhda, doesn’t even know what form she settled into, but maybe she’s just as stoic as Illya. Maybe she watched silently as he vanished into the distance.

The anger leaves Napoleon all at once. A part of him, irrationally, still resents Illya – for being him, for being Russian, for knowing that his government at least did not separate children from their souls as part of some sick experiment. Mostly, though, he’s tired.

Gaby is nodding, looking surprisingly alert after the day they’ve had. “Is Novaya Zemlya the only place like this?”

Illya looks fit to fall asleep on his feet, and perhaps that’s why he so openly gazes longingly at Ferdi. “I doubt it. Nadezhda, there – there’s not much for them to do, but there is a library. The last time we spoke, she said that she found Navajo stories that she thinks are about the same thing. She thinks that perhaps there are these places all over the world, but they have been forgotten.”

“How long ago?”

Corona’s voice is so unexpected, Napoleon almost doesn’t register it at first. Illya looks just as surprised, blinking down at her owlishly. When the answer to her question doesn’t come quickly enough, Corona jumps onto the back of the armchair, so that she’s near(er) to Illya’s eye level. “How long ago,” she repeats, “did you last see her?”

_Too long_ , Napoleon thinks, even though the question wasn’t for him. He can’t help but do the math in his head: ten months since Rome, another month before that for good measure –

With only the slightest tremor to his voice, Illya says, “Seventeen months.”

 

**+One.**

In the end, it’s all very anticlimactic. Gaby passes the information on to Waverly, and two months later they have a week’s leave in London. These breaks are few and far between, and the three of them typically go their separate ways; not that Gaby doesn’t love her boys, but living in each others’ pockets for months on end is a trial no matter who it is.

She spends her leave in Brighton. At the end of the week, when she steps into Waverly’s office for their mission briefing, she finds Illya sat on the floor beside an enormous lynx cat. Waverly isn’t there, and Gaby says nothing, taking her usual chair.

Nadezhda looks comfortable, sprawled on the floor on her side, the thick fur on her paw just brushing Illya’s leg. Neither she nor Illya seem particularly emotional, but Gaby doesn’t think she’s imagining the red in his eyes, and she _knows_ she’s not imagining when Ferdi flits down to perch on Nadezhda’s paw and the lynx gives a soft purr.

“Well, I don’t know about you all,” Napoleon says, adjusting his cufflinks as he strides into the room, “but I had a perfectly wonderful – “

He freezes, blinking down at Nadezhda. Corona steps forward, her ears perked, tail wagging softly, and touches her nose to the lynx’s. Napoleon’s delighted laugh could outshine the sun.

If Waverly is a half-hour late to their briefing, no one mentions it.


End file.
